Just Discovered: Windows Live Writer

Last night, on my home PC, Windows Messenger needed to be updated to a newer version.  I relented, and did the install.  Along the way, an option to install Windows Live Writer was pushed in front of me, so I decided what the heck and installed it.

After getting it installed, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to compose a new blog post.  I did a test post, and saved it in draft mode.  The post was easily seen online, just the way I had written it, saved as a draft.  That post included a picture, like this one, and the picture was uploaded exactly where it should have been.

Above, you can click on the screen shot to see how Live Writer is a true WYSIWYG editor.  The style of my blog is coming through perfectly to the editor, which the normal editor for my blog doesn’t do nearly as well.

As a further test, I just wrote and published this post about selling a Phoenix home, using Live Writer.

So far, this tool is darned near ideal.  Another huge bonus, is that I now get real time feedback about misspelled words.  I’ll freely admit, I need spelling support.  I can’t find any downsides so far, so I’m going to keep using it until I do.

There is a bit of a drawback, however.  Tagging and SEO tools aren’t able to be managed from Live Writer, as they are admin plug-ins.  So, I’ll always need to save each post as a draft, and then publish from the blog, after doing those final activities.  I much prefer the WYSIWYG editor for composition, and when ready to publish, there’s an option to save the draft and edit online.  That works perfectly for doing any additional plug-in required tasks before publishing.